This film within a film is a haunting, lyrical chronicle of recent years in the Arab world, where revolutions seemed to spark hope for change and yield further instability in one stroke. Khalid Abdalla (THE KITE RUNNE, THE SQUARE) plays the protagonist of Tamer El Said’s ambitious feature debut, a filmmaker in Cairo attempting to capture the zeitgeist of his city as the world changes around him—from personal love and loss to the fall of the Mubarak regime. Throughout, friends send footage and stories from Berlin, Baghdad, and Beirut, creating a powerful, multilayered meditation on togetherness, the tangible hold of cities, and the meaning of homeland. Shot in 2008 and completed in 2016, the film explores the weight of cinematic images as record and storytelling in an ongoing time of change.

Without doubt the most important event in Egyptian cinema, if not Arab cinema, in a very long time.